"Know Me": British Airways keeps tabs on its best customers

What's happening

British Airways is ushering in the airline equivalent of the friendly maitre d'. Their "Know Me" programme collects data on VIPs and frequent travellers, and makes it available to staff and crew, for more personalised customer service (ETurboNews.com, 29 October 2012).

Messages about specific customers, based on past travel experiences, will be sent to staff iPads and check-in computers. Staff can also input useful information about customers using their own initiative.

"Know Me" is able to search Google Images for photos so staff can recognise specific customers and welcome them accordingly. The airline is aiming to manage 4,500 of these personal recognition messages a day by the end of 2012.

To keep all contact relevant and interesting, a "delivery lab" has been set up to analyse the way BA communicates with customers and to ensure its messaging is working.

What this means to business

Frequent travellers are web-savvy consumers. They are likely to be unfazed by the well-organised — and well-intentioned — use of data if it means that better customer service is clearly the end result. However, they will be carefully weighing up the trade-off between the use of their data and actual service improvements.